Dear R users / devs,
There's been requests in the past for a text editor built into the Rgui
for Windows, from which code can be submitted to the R console.
Something along the lines of the script editor in S-Plus. Currently
Rgui can only display a file read-only in a pager. As far as I can tell
there's been little motivation to implement an editor, as most
developers use (the excellent) ESS, or don't use Windows. I also use
ESS, but the students here are taught S-Plus and learn to use the .ssc
editor. I think it would be a good selling point if the equivalent
existed for R, without the need to use an external editor (or a hack in
Tcl/Tk).
So I'd like to write one and contribute it. I've had a quick mess with
the code, and I've now got a partially usable editor working. Before I
go any further and implement it fully, I just wanted to ask whether
this is a desirable thing for R. In case there are long-term plans to
scrap and rewrite the whole Rgui code base... Any gotchas, dos or
don'ts for writing this? I suppose we'd want something like a new R
function file.edit to open the file for editing, analogously to
file.show which opens a text file read-only. Currently edit() can be
used to invoke an editor, but that seems to be designed to work on
objects rather than files.
Chris
--
Christopher Jackson <chris.jackson at imperial.ac.uk>, Research Associate,
Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial College
School of Medicine, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, tel. 020 759 43371